EDITOR’S BLOG: Recruiters as corporate spies?
20 March 2013
Should recruiters ever use candidate interviews to snare some hot competitive intelligence?
Thu, 21 Mar 2013 | By DeeDee Doke
Should recruiters ever use candidate interviews to snare some hot competitive intelligence?
Or is there an ethical line to be drawn either when candidates offer insider information or your own colleagues ask you to glean it – or on both occasions?
There’s black, white and a significant amount of grey hovering around this particular debate, which surfaced on an evening last week over wine, beer, cranberry juice and crisps when some in-house recruiters revealed that they feel the heat from colleagues to find out more about competitors than just top-line information such as a candidate’s salary and team size when they interview candidates from those firms for jobs.
While such a function might “almost turn your recruitment team from a cost centre to a profit centre”, as one in-house recruiter wryly put it, “competitive intelligence does raise a few concerns”.
Sometimes candidates themselves want to share all kinds of hush-hush information with a competitor’s recruiter, in an attempt to nail down a new job. But often, the recruiters agreed, such a gamble ends up biting back with a rejection; recruiters and line managers may seek that vengeful – or naïve – candidate as a potential liability ie, “if they’d do it once, they’d probably do again”.
On the other hand, expecting deep strategic digging of recruiters while they recruit could cheapen the whole recruitment process, turning it into the business equivalent of a one-night stand when one participant is left damaged after thinking the other really, really cared. No one wins.
Or is gleaning what you can during a conversation with a candidate “just good recruitment”, as another participant suggested.
Should recruiters ever use candidate interviews to snare some hot competitive intelligence?
Or is there an ethical line to be drawn either when candidates offer insider information or your own colleagues ask you to glean it – or on both occasions?
There’s black, white and a significant amount of grey hovering around this particular debate, which surfaced on an evening last week over wine, beer, cranberry juice and crisps when some in-house recruiters revealed that they feel the heat from colleagues to find out more about competitors than just top-line information such as a candidate’s salary and team size when they interview candidates from those firms for jobs.
While such a function might “almost turn your recruitment team from a cost centre to a profit centre”, as one in-house recruiter wryly put it, “competitive intelligence does raise a few concerns”.
Sometimes candidates themselves want to share all kinds of hush-hush information with a competitor’s recruiter, in an attempt to nail down a new job. But often, the recruiters agreed, such a gamble ends up biting back with a rejection; recruiters and line managers may seek that vengeful – or naïve – candidate as a potential liability ie, “if they’d do it once, they’d probably do again”.
On the other hand, expecting deep strategic digging of recruiters while they recruit could cheapen the whole recruitment process, turning it into the business equivalent of a one-night stand when one participant is left damaged after thinking the other really, really cared. No one wins.
Or is gleaning what you can during a conversation with a candidate “just good recruitment”, as another participant suggested.
- What’s your experience? And where should recruiters draw the line? Tell us by writing to DeeDee Doke at [email protected] and read more about this topic in the April issue of Recruiter.
